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How Green Is My Mansion?

Susan and Chuck Fadley, neighbors of the site where Mitch Kapor wants to build a house, at the site. They think the proposed house will be too big to be considered green.Credit
Drew Kelly for The New York Times

MITCH KAPOR, the software mogul and philanthropist, has given millions of dollars to environmental groups.

Now Mr. Kapor wants to build a 10,000-square-foot house, complete with a 10-car garage, in Berkeley, Calif.

When the house won planning approval earlier this year, many neighbors were surprised — not so much by the size of the house, or by its sleek design, but by the fact that, under Berkeley regulations, the house will qualify as “green.” In Berkeley, building proposals are evaluated on a “green point” scale, earning credit for such eco-conscious features as low-flow shower heads and insulation. A house with more than 60 points is labeled green, regardless of its size.

Gary Earl Parsons, a Berkeley architect and a member of that city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, called the designation of the Kapor house as green “absurd.”

Greg Powell, the city’s senior planner assigned to the project, defended the point system. “True, the greenest house is the house you don’t build,” he said. “But we assume people are going to build new homes, and we encourage them to make them better.”

But the system’s failure to account for size enrages some environmentalists, who note that a 10,000-square-foot house is likely to require four times the resources of the average new American house, which, according to the Census Bureau, is under 2,500 square feet.

In an appeal of the Kapor decision to the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board, a group of neighbors, including Susan and Chuck Fadley, who live about 200 yards from where the Kapors hope to build, wrote that “green building begins with using ‘just enough’ and preserving what already exists. Clearly the idea of ‘just enough’ is not part of the design concept.”

Donn Logan, Mr. Kapor’s architect, wrote in an e-mail message that he and Mr. Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp., were too busy to respond to questions. But Mr. Logan, of the firm Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects, said it is unfair to describe the house as having 10,000 square feet; its living area is 6,500 square feet. (The garage accounts for 3,500 square feet.)

Mr. Logan said the Web site of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, MKF.org, offered proof of Mr. Kapor’s commitment to environmental causes. The foundation has given grants to dozens of environmental programs in California.

But the controversy over whether a large house can be green has implications far beyond the wooded lot on Rose Street, where Mr. Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit that promotes fairness in educational and workplace settings, hope to live.

Nationally, some 10,000 buildings have been certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program of the United States Green Building Council.

Like Berkeley’s green designation, LEED certification relies on a point system. Buildings get credit for specific eco-friendly features, some of which can be rewarded with tax credits or abatements. The LEED for Homes system “reallocates” points if a house is much larger than average, according to Scot Horst, the green building council’s vice president for LEED. But that reallocation doesn’t prevent very large homes from achieving LEED designations, he said, so long as they include enough green features.

Photo

A “green” house by the Atlanta architect William H. Harrison, who says clients who can build big houses lead the way on using green technology.Credit
John Umberger

“In other parts of the world, there are government mandates for building performance,” Mr. Horst said. “But we don’t do that in the United States.”

William H. Harrison, an Atlanta architect with a stable of wealthy clients, said penalizing people for building large houses could slow the adoption of green building practices. “The people who can afford the green technologies are going to want large houses,” he said. And those innovations, he said, will trickle down to smaller houses.

Mr. Harrison said that one of his clients is planning to build a 25,000-square-foot house in Los Angeles. But he opted out of the LEED system, Mr. Harrison said, when he learned that it was virtually impossible to get the highest LEED rating, known as platinum.

“He’s a billionaire, and he drives a Prius, for God’s sake,” said Mr. Harrison of his client. “He wants to do the right thing, environmentally. And now he’s being told, ‘You’re not good enough, because your house is too big.’ ”That, Mr. Harrison said, “is about socialism, not sustainability.”

Mr. Harrison said he is working on a 50,000-square-foot house in Kiev, Ukraine. The project, he said, “is going to employ 5,000 people for three years. All those people will have jobs, and feed their families. Should I tell my client not to build it? Or should I participate — try to make it as green as possible? The answer is, I should do what I’m doing. I don’t feel guilty at all.”

Jim Nicolow, the director of sustainability at Lord, Aeck & Sargent, an architecture firm with offices in Atlanta; Ann Arbor, Mich., and Chapel Hill, N.C., credited LEED with making sustainability a part of the discussion between architects and clients. But, he said, “there are a lot of problems with the system.”

For architects, Mr. Nicolow said, there is a constant question of whether to take a bad project and try to make it better. “I don’t fault the architect for making a living,” he said. “If you get a project, you tend to take the project.”

Berkeley’s green point system was developed by a nonprofit group called Built It Green and adopted by the city government. Items on the checklist include: tightly seal the air barrier between the garage and living area; insulate hot water pipes; use Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood; use paint low in volatile organic compounds. About 70 local governments in California have ordinances based on the Build It Green checklist, according to Bruce Mast, an executive of the organization.

The plan for the Kapors’ house received 91 points, 31 more than required for a green designation in Berkeley. Before the couple can start building, they will have to demolish an existing 2,500-square-foot house on the site and cut down mature trees.

But the site of the Kapor house is so large, said Mr. Powell of Berkeley, that even with a very big house, the percentage of the lot that is covered will be low for the area. And, he said, they are proposing the 10-car garage not because they have a lot of cars, but because neighbors expressed concern about on-street parking. They’re addressing the issue “on their own nickel,” he said.

Because the decision to approve the house has been appealed, the city council will review the case in April, Mr. Powell said. The council, he said, could approve the application, set a hearing date or remand the case to the zoning board for reconsideration.

However the Kapor case is decided, it could lead to changes in the checklist approach used in Berkeley and elsewhere. In their appeal to the board, residents proposed a modification to the “green point” system.

Since the house is at least the size of three typical houses, they wrote, “the 91 green points earned should really be divided by three, yielding a score of 30.”

That is far below the number required for a green designation.

A version of this article appears in print on March 11, 2010, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: How Green Is My Mansion?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe